July, 2011

Tornados hit East Nashville in the late 1990s and knocked down anything natural and wooden, and so there's precious little left here in the way of shade. We've had some trees planted, but they take a while to grow up into anything that'll subdue the misery index. That's all fine, as Eric Brace and I are playing Houston on July 22, so this'll serve as a training camp. "It's hotter than concrete/ July in Houston/ And it'll get even worse before it turns nice," Lyle Lovett wrote. I trust he's true to his word, but we're sure looking forward to getting down there anyway.
On the way down, Eric and I will be playing a concert, from some hotel room, and you can watch it if you like. We've been doing regular shows through www.stageit.com, and I've come to be a fan of StageIt both as a musician and as a fan. The idea is that someone you're interested in checking out (in my case, I always watch songwriter Don Schlitz's StageIt shows) is playing a show wherever they happen to be, and the StageIt folks allow that show to be beamed from their room to wherever you are, via some kind of complicated computer stuff that I don't understand. But I don't have to understand: To watch a Schlitz show, I just go to the site, pay a small (I think it's a dollar or something) fee via my triple-platinum, Americana-certified credit card and sit back and watch/listen to the show. And to play shows, I just head to the Red Beet Records headquarters or to wherever we're staying on the road, someone points a laptop at me for the video feed and we adjust a few microphone levels for the audio, and then we're on.
Lots of gigs planned soon, and you can check the "dates" page for those. I'll be doing a better job keeping this "Journal" up to date, as I'm going half-time at The Tennessean newspaper in order to concentrate more on music-making. Please email me directly at peter@petercoopermusic.com if you're interested in setting up a show in your town. Have van and tunes, will travel. Baby needs shoes.
-Peter Cooper